For the Supreme Commander of Street Wars, a normal day in the office entails threatening co-workers to work faster with a two-foot machete in hand. A typical evening includes averting multiple assassins armed with squirt guns. ...

Friday, October 30, 2009

After the layoffs, and the bailouts, and the economy doing the two-girls-one-cup on itself, we here at Shadow Government headquarters have noticed a significant drop in our initiatives of FUN. StreetWars and Rental Car Rally have combined to have 42% drop in sign ups for 2009, an unprecedented decrease in our five years of operation.

My own theory is that so many people just have the wind knocked out of them these days, and somewhere in the fear and discomfort, we all lost a bit of our adventurousness and fun seeking (especially if it costs money). Excessive merry making to some degree seems inconsequential or inappropriate.

Case in point is the general lack of costumes I have seen all day today in downtown San Francisco.

Of course, the presentation I attended at IDEO this week on "Innovation", reminded me of the fallacious theory that product innovations are stifled as companies entrenched during recessions.

Also, video games are doing great. So people still want escape. But halloween costume making, and investing a whole month of your life to be destroyed (in a fun way), is not exactly escapism oriented fun.

I could be entirely wrong and I am making too much out of a small sample size.